Portland Public Schools, refund checks, and a 2-question survey

[burnt]

So I made one of my many email accounts available to my kid's school - they have a listserv, and its a great opportunity for parents and teachers to communicate with one another.

As some of you probably know, Portland had an income tax for the last couple of years. Why? Because Portland Public Schools was in the red. In fact, the entire state's education fund was in the red, but the reason it was in the red, was mostly due to Portland's spending excesses.

Now to be fair, Portland's also the state's biggest city. But we're not overwhelmingly the state's biggest city. This isn't Illinois where it goes corn, corn, corn, Chicago!, corn, corn... - Beaverton's got a pretty hefty population, and a helluva lot more traditional families live there than Portland. For example. Yet Portland Public Schools seems to be where the big cash drain is coming from.

As some of you probably know, the City Income Tax is going away. Mayor Tom Potter may or may not start advocating another round of local income tax, but its incredibly doubtful that it will pass if he does.

Why? Because Portlanders already gave away a fat chunk of our money to PPS, to get PPS back on their feet, monetarily speaking, and PPS fucked around with the cash. Two years later (and two years richer) and they're simply not back on their feet!

So anyway - the listserv, right? A lot of the parents most active on it, are these 2-party households where one parent has the luxury of staying home. They own their own house, they own their own car, they have the luxury of spare time for picking up their child every day after school and attending PTA meetings - and they're about to press the State of Oregon to give the kicker checks to the schools, instead of the citizens.

I recently got an email from a daddy named "Doug" who pointed us to a petition/survey. Doug's little email mentioned the fact that you can take the survey as many times as you want (and followed up this little factoid with a winky-winky emoticon, thanks Dougy, bigups).

So I figured I'd take it upon myself to counter Doug's little attempt at a yuppie coup, by posting the link to the survey here. Every one of you who lives in Oregon, and is reading this, should have a voice - not just the successful one-sided parents spamming my mailbox with notices about bake sales.

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http://portlandorassoc.weblinkconnect.com/CWT/External/WCPages/WCSurveys/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=13
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Take a minute to tell them what you think.

[BettieRage]

Thanks for the heads up!

[burnt]

word. here's what I wrote:

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Not all but some. I'm willing to give "some" of my kicker.

I believe that PPS is failing to live within their means, and that a 3rd party Accounting oversight team would be appropriate here. Portland (in fact, most of Oregon) is just starting to get back on its feet after a near-recession, and its unfair to keep taxing its citizens in order to accomodate an irresponsible school budget, when we cannot contribute to the budget's organization and details. We need someone in there to cut back on the excesses used by executives and consultants assessing an ever-increasing number of so-called "Special Needs" children. I strongly believe that Portland assesses far too many children as being mildly autistic or "Special Needs". Its apparent that there are many high-salaried professionals who have a vested interest in an increasing number of children determined to have these so-called social/chemical imbalances, and I for one fail to see how the "isolation therapy" advocated by all of these very expensive so-called experts, is working.

Its time to get an independent State-driven oversight team involved - PPS is stagnating the future of Portland's development, by keeping incredibly bright (but bouncy) children isolated and medicated. We're damaging these children by telling them at an early age "You have a chemical imbalance, thats why you're bouncy, its not your fault, your brain just doesn't work right." I strongly believe that there are far too many people making a quick profit by asserting that more and more of Portland's children have these "problems" and I strongly believe that if we obtained an objective opinion, we'd put more kids in regular classrooms, and cut back on a lot of un-necessary spending that in the long run is partially responsible for creating less-motivated (or in many cases criminally-motivated) young adults.

Think about it. How many loud teenagers do you see in the malls with an overwhelming disrespect for authority or "inside voices"? Have you noticed an increase in the overall number of these young adults? How many of these poor young people do you think spent their formative years riding the short bus, being told they're not good enough for the "regular" classroom, simply because they drummed their fingers one time too many? There will always be loud/rude teenagers, but if you think today's generation of loud/rude teenagers is not noticeably ruder - or that the sampling of loud/rude teenagers is the same size its always been - then you're being naive.

PPS uses far too much of the state's overall budget, and PPS is 75% responsible for the state's school budget falling into the red. Its time for the State to assert themselves over the City. The State needs to make it clear that if they give this money to PPS, its done so *ONLY* on the condition that PPS relinquishes much of their budgetary control to a State budgetary oversight team. We don't need to fire any teachers, but there's a hefty number of consultants who many Oregonians feel have overstayed their welcome and outlived their usefulness. Its become yet another reason for every other rural city/town in Oregon to resent Portland, and its time we all did something to rectify this.

[burnt]

bump.

[FUCKINMETAL]

any particular way you want me to vote?

[burnt]

haha, yea honestly.

although a "yes or no" option on a big question like that is kind of a shitty survey, huh...